


A/B/Overdrive (The Happy Wreck Remix)

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Crack Treated Seriously, Knotting, M/M, Mating Bites, Mating Bond, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Omega Verse, Pining, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 04:56:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7029637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blake and Avon push their luck on a mission; it runs out. </p><p>(A remix of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4963891">A/B (O).</a> Please see notes for a quickie 'how to read this if you read the original first'.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Original Begining

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A/B (O)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4963891) by [x_los](https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los). 



> After doing three remixes, I felt like remixing myself and experimenting with the format. Wanky, but there we are. Chapter 1 is the original version of the story up to this point, and Chapter 2 is our branching-off point, where a small change leads to the story going differently.

After the solar flares died away, and after the radiation from those flares and the Last War had finally cleared, the Ark returned human life to Earth. The newly-formed Federation’s scientists, liking order and wanting to restore a planetary population in a hurry, had devised a method of hierarchically organized breeding that promised to swell the ranks even as it sorted the wheat from the chaff. In one respect, it was a phenomenal success. Within generations, Earth’s human population had returned to sustainable levels--the breeding problems caused by fallout-related genetic degradation and related sterility thoroughly corrected. However the new breeding system had also resulted in unpleasant, messy, physicality that ran against the grain of the culture the scientists had instilled in the people they’d bred. The system’s hierarchies were found to be inconvenient and imperfect. Thus a Re-grading disposed of these initial Alpha, Beta and Omega categories and organized humans along a theoretically meritocratic system based on intelligence-testing, which followed the alphabet in a more logical progression (though familial connections, economic-class bias and regionalism inevitably undermined its supposed disinterested objectivity).

Geneticists tried to weed out the legacy of the A/B/O period, but the codes had been designed for hardiness in a rough new world, and the scientists tasked with undoing their predecessors’ work met with limited success. Culture also interfered. To be an Alpha in any sense was a status symbol, and powerful families were reluctant to give up their genetic uniqueness. To be an Omega was to occupy a differently privileged and unprivileged category. People resisted passing their children over for gene-therapy for a host of reasons: familial pride, politics, a sense of identification with one’s sex-class, distrust of the government that offered such therapies, the hope that one’s sex-class might lend one safety and power in some respect, and (where applicable) an acknowledgement of the sheer genetic utility of being able to both father and mother children. Abilities and memory were inveigled in the question, and the genes themselves did not go quietly.

By the time Roj Blake, leader of the Freedom Party, was banished from Earth, roughly a quarter of the population of that planet was still in some way A/B/O-carrying (while every soul thereupon was under the sway of the new system, with its confusing overlapping terminology, so obviously predicated on the new grades being the total replacement they had never quite managed to become). Roughly five percent of the total population was Omega.

Roj Blake had a lot of reasons for resisting the government. The fact that, in addition to being classed Alpha under the new system, he was also a part of the five-percent Omega demographic was just one of them, and not a terribly significant one at that.

***

A lot of people initially thought Avon was an Omega. He couldn’t really see why. Vila claimed _he_ could, but Avon didn’t pay a lot of attention to what Vila (a Beta himself--genetically distinct from the new Unmarked model, with a better-developed vomeronasal organ) claimed. The composition of their crew was slightly statistically unlikely, in that it contained two Alphas (himself and Jenna), Vila (whose whole family had evidently proved as resistant to gene-therapy as he himself was to reconditioning), and of course--Blake.

Gan’s colony had formed before the experiments had taken place, and so he was wholly unmarked. Human, original flavor--not even the reboot edition. Cally thought Terran mating systems bizarre and Byzantine. Jenna agreed with her--she couldn’t see forming some crushing, life-long union herself. She liked Blake a lot, and would have given him a bit of attention if he’d seemed inclined, but she wasn’t offended that he didn’t, and she wanted more freedom and flexibility than the responsibility of a mating bond would offer her.

Avon understood Jenna’s point of view. Avon valued his freedom. Avon valued his flexibility. Avon would nevertheless have bonded Blake at the hint of a wish, would have crawled on his hands and knees over broken glass to do it. All Blake had to do was ask. And it was vital to Avon that he _ask,_ rather than submit for any reason other than pure, voluntary willingness (Blake had never yet shown a hint of submission to anything--Avon tried not to think about what it might look like if he did). Blake had to want it, like—well, like Avon did. For the reasons he did.

But Blake, vocal proponent of Omega rights and free choice (and why, Avon thought wryly, shouldn’t he be?), of course, did not ask.

Avon had only ever wanted to bond once before. But Anna had been married, and it had been a sweet impossibility, would have given them away immediately. He’d held himself back, trembling over her, a hand firm on her neck covering the flesh that cradled the relevant gland so he couldn’t bite by accident. He’d never so much as touched her when she’d been near a cycle. Though she’d never bonded with her Unmarked husband either. She'd been his in almost every way that mattered. She’d been his to protect, though he’d failed, and that haunted him. Even though, to his horror, he was now a little _glad_ they'd never bonded, because—and he couldn’t hide from the ugliness of this—he knew it would have been the wrong decision. The wrong mating.

Because he couldn’t see himself--managing that, with Blake. He might have tried propositioning Blake on less than total terms, if he’d thought he could. But Blake was completely unashamed of what he was, and didn’t wear the typical scent-masking colognes, only going on suppressants (and disappearing discreetly into his cabin) for a few days a month, and when such discretion was vital for missions. He wore loose, comfortable clothing that showed his neck, and didn’t keep his hair close-cropped to the skull. Thus his apocrine glands were exposed and scent lingered in his hair. To Avon, Blake smelled like sex and comfort and home, whatever the hell _that_ meant. Like foods no longer produced on Earth. Wildly, Avon lashed out for equivalents: full and bloody, like the single time he’d had steak. Sweet, like the chemical-excess of a knicker-knacker delight. Sharp, like air right from a filter. Too much and perfect. And Avon knew absolutely that he could not handle anything of the kind. If he tried to touch him--careful and off-cycle, just taking the edge off for both their sakes--he thought he might well bite through his own hand to get to Blake’s neck.

Every Alpha could bond with every Alpha, Beta, Omega or New-Class Unmarked, but only exceptional instances of compatibility resulted in a pull that could bring the afflicted to his or her knees. And Avon had thought, as the clean-filtered air of the Liberator cleared the London’s double-dose of suppressants out of his lungs, and the man he’d reluctantly fallen in love with was suddenly so present that Avon could have located him anywhere on the ship, _Oh._ Of course. Of-bloody- _course_. Not ‘a carrier of some kind, probably another Alpha, under these drugs’ after all. He would have to be an Omega, _wouldn’t_ he? A highly political Omega, who Avon’s body started incessantly screaming at him to take irrevocably, and who would want less than nothing to do with him. With Avon’s gauche, uncivilized, needy demands.

Avon would have gone on a regular diet of suppressants himself, but they were hell on his concentration, and he could barely afford to be out of commission for ruts as it was. His ruts were, of course, synchronized with Blake’s heats--which was:

i.         handy, in that it compressed the ship’s most vulnerable period into a tight interval of three days,

ii.       inconvenient, in that it meant the de facto captain and second in command were simultaneously absent (Jenna’s body keeping its own irregular spacer’s time), and

iii.       humiliating, in that everyone must know, if they gave it any thought, that his body wanted Blake’s so much he lay in his room _burning_ in time with it.).

Perhaps they thought it didn’t mean anything personal. His affinity with Blake was just a biological fact. Blake and _Vila_ might have synchronized, if Avon hadn’t been there to override the Beta with his ‘louder’ signal. But Avon knew it meant everything personal.

A lot of people believed, almost as a matter of course, than an Omega wasn’t precisely leadership material. Blake didn’t even waste time proving them wrong--he just used everything at his disposal, including his sex-class, to get what he wanted. Omegas were, by design, supposed to be the nucleus of a community--to draw in people around a pair-bond, to announce that here was safety, something generative: protection and fertility and promise. Avon looked around at the people clustered to Blake, their companionship and service evidence of Blake’s charisma, and knew other people erred in thinking Alphas some sort of pack-leaders. He was just Blake’s hound--or, to be kinder to himself, the other half of the mated-pair that wasn’t.

Testing his leash only served to make its strength and short length clear. He could never leave. Why should Blake bond with him? He didn’t even have to, to secure its dubious benefits.

***

Three things sometimes made Avon wonder if Blake was toying with him. Not the clothing--it was obvious that Blake did that without a hint of malice aforethought, and with no one but himself in mind. It shouldn’t even be rude, really--it was Avon’s own vulnerability that made it affecting.

Item One: Blake fought with him constantly. True, Blake led, and thus had to contend with opposition. True, Avon himself picked many of the fights. But Blake wasn’t ignorant of what he and Avon were, and he could have de-escalated the arguments accordingly if he’d wanted to. Avon had seen him manage people splendidly in similar regards, all the time. But Blake didn’t manage Avon well at all, here. Or--he seemed not to. Avon didn’t entirely discount the idea that Blake was working according to some larger strategy here that he couldn’t quite discern. Blake let the fights play out--and they were always real, over real concerns--until Avon, at his wit’s end, felt close to losing control.

He never would. Not without Blake’s enthusiastic permission, or it would be sick and sad and mean _nothing_. Besides, Blake would never accept any bond forced upon him, and the idea of Blake rejecting his bond was the stuff of Avon’s nightmares. But Blake pushed Avon to the point where Avon’s conscious mind, frustrated and exhausted, was almost overwhelmed by his bewildered, unhappy instinctual self, got lost in a muddled mess of _why won’t you listen why don’t you submit to me why aren’t you mine_.

He had no idea why Blake would do that to him. (Because he knew Blake knew just how chemically affected by him Avon was--it would be difficult for him to miss the way Avon’s body tensed and then relaxed inexorably when he walked into a room, a puppet on a string. And Blake was nothing if not perceptive.) Perhaps Blake--couldn’t help doing it. But that didn’t seem likely.

Item Two: The worst of these arguments were about Blake’s propensity for putting them, himself, in danger. When humans had returned to earth, time and radiation had rendered the landscape dangerous, and the wildlife more so—humans hadn’t been the planet’s apex predators for a long, long time. Alphas were designed to defend. Alphas were intended to protect themselves and their mates, children and social-packs while humanity built the domes and started up the long re-terraforming process. (That process had, of course, become irrelevant by the time it was complete—sometimes Avon felt he was equally atavistic and surplus to requirements. The administration had become reliant on the domes as a mechanism of control, and would have much preferred that ancient transmatt technology hadn’t been lost to time than that their predecessors had worked to give them back the richness of the earth). When Blake said, ‘You don’t have to go, I’ll do it myself’ like that was _better_ , Avon wondered if Blake did it to _spite_ him.

Item Three: Blake talked about wanting a family. Oh, not just now. If and when. In the highly improbable event they survived and won this conflict.

Blake could bear children, of course. And he would like to, if they were terribly lucky. Avon snidely pointed out how unlikely that was, and Blake gave him a hard look and said he knew. Avon didn’t say this was torture--that Blake couldn’t, _mustn’t_ talk about the children he’d like to bear for or give someone else, when every rut Avon bred Blake in his fever-dreams and felt _whole_ , and woke up shivering, spent, dehydrated. Aching for the loss of something that never was.

***

Twice and only twice, people had assumed they were together.

One ‘your partner’ on Space City. “You’re mistaken,” Avon had said through a clenched-teeth smile.

One very kind old woman, who’d assumed they were just waiting for the next coinciding heat cycle before bonding, and had made a few remarks--you saw so few A/O couples these days, out in the colonies. The strain was breeding out. She remembered her own bonding. She wished them well.

Avon tried not to be harsh to anyone who couldn’t handle it and give their own back besides. He’d smiled and gone along with it, play-acting for the space of a few minutes. Blake had been stiff and uncharacteristically awkward. ( _Can’t you even pretend?_ Avon had thought, angry and piercingly sad.)

“If you ever learn that people prefer pleasing fictions to the truth, your political career may actually advance,” Avon had sneered, warding off any devastating remark from Blake, any eviscerating sympathy, any discussion of how, for once in his life, Avon had proved a competent actor.

***

Blake shifted uncomfortably on the flight deck couch.

“What is it?” Avon asked in a flat tone. Deliberately unconcerned. They were alone, and it was night, or the ship’s equivalent thereof.

“I wonder if I’m coming down with a cold,” Blake murmured. “I feel awful.”

“It--isn’t a cold,” Avon informed him, studying his own computer readouts carefully. Blake’s heat had been coming on for two days (early--irregularity was the curse of space travel), and it had been a peculiar, low, sweet agony to Avon. It was, of course, dragging Avon along with it, pulling him by an invisible thread. His own body temperature was higher than usual. His own cheeks were slightly blood-flushed.

“Ah,” Blake said after a moment. Possibly he was disconcerted that Avon knew better than he did. Well. That couldn’t be helped. Now he’d take himself off into his room, and switch the air-filters onto local, and take drugs and fuck himself in ways Avon didn’t let himself imagine (because there was a danger as it was, wasn’t there, in being clever enough to easily unravel his door locks and Blake’s, even in the confusion of rut). Avon would go to his own room, and filter all the air on the ship, and know a little peace.

He wanted that relief, even as he liked to put it off. How long could he stay coherent? How long could he stand to be around Blake, like this? The fact was (gratification and how _powerful_ he felt in rut aside) Avon didn’t like the days of isolation. The frantic urges interspersed with boredom, the days during which he was unable to concentrate on anything complex. The sudden, total absence of Blake, whose pheromones his body had developed a kind of reliance on (putting it that way was easier than saying he simply missed Blake’s company, though both were true). When Blake switched on the local filters, it was like he was missing or dead. Confused by rut, Avon always felt a moment’s sharp, protective panic--even though, rationally, he knew exactly what had happened, and that it _always_ happened.

“We’ve managed to put a good amount of distance between ourselves and Travis,” Avon offered. “He shouldn’t be able to come upon us at an inconvenient— What?”

Blake’s posture had shifted slightly. A bitter note, a trace of _fear_ (interesting--Blake was rarely afraid), had made its way into his scent. Perhaps, to be polite, Avon should pretend he couldn’t tell, but then Avon had never been particularly polite.

“Nothing.” Blake shook his head, looking as though he’d stand, a prelude to taking himself off.

“Why are you lying to me?” Avon demanded, narrowing his eyes.

“Because I don’t want to discuss this,” Blake snarled, working himself towards a protective anger.

He spoilt it by turning his head to look at Avon, and in so doing catching guarded concern in the other man’s expression.

“I don’t want to,” Blake said again, more gently. “But you probably deserve to know. After I’d shot Travis, when they were interrogating me, he--thought of a way to damage me, in return for the way I’d damaged him.” Avon despised where this was going. “No one likes to lose to an Omega, do they?” Blake said with false good humor.

“He--” Avon started. Stopped.

“He tried to force a bond,” Blake said matter-of-factly, staring at nothing. “But I would have had to complete the circuit, with intent. And they can torture you until you don’t know what you want, and force your mouth open, and position your teeth, and shock you until your jaw clamps down hard enough to break bones, but they can’t make you _mean_ it. With training, you can resist almost anything. If you curl into yourself and make a place they can’t touch, a room with no walls that stretches on forever, if you’re prepared to die in there, then--you can take a few things with you. The names of a few friends you’d _rather_ die than give up. A few scraps of dignity. That was my scrap. If I give myself, I intend to mean it.”

When he glanced up, Avon was looking at him with surprisingly naked sympathy. It painted his face like anguish--rippling and complex as a river in motion. Eddies and cross-currents of thought and feeling, butting against and flowing into one another.

“That’s why I lied,” Blake finished. “That’s why I--reacted like I did to the idea of Travis coming across us at an inconvenient moment.”

“I’m sorry,” Avon said in a rush, the unfamiliar words tumbling out of him like the sudden swinging give of a rusty gate.

“You’re not the one who should be sorry,” Blake said, voice brisker now, standing up. “Thank you for listening. I suspect I should have told someone that--a while ago. But I didn’t remember it, after the mind-wipe, and when I did there was so much else to do.”

“It might have proven a liability,” Avon said, in a gentle enough tone that this didn’t land as a recrimination. “Perhaps you should make the time to exorcise your ghosts. Lest they catch you up.”

“Oh, there’s never any time for what I want,” Blake said, not self-pitying but direct. “Other things _matter_ more. I can’t let myself forget that.”

“And will they always matter more?” Avon asked. “It doesn’t sound to me like much of a life.”

Blake shrugged. “I don’t need much of a life. Though there’s always hope.”

“Is there?”

“Oh yes, Avon. It’s what makes all this bearable. See you after the worst of it.”

And Blake left, and, a few minutes later, ‘died’. Or didn’t. Avon felt his stupid heart judder with it, then return to its accustomed course as he ruthlessly corrected the misapprehension

Avon wondered what Blake had wanted him to take from that conversation. He smiled, unamused, at the typical-Alpha clamor of response in his brain. Oh, what he’d _give_ to kill Travis for Blake. Not a gift Blake would want. Like Pompey’s head to Caesar. But even so.


	2. Branch-Off Point

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The remix proper.

The mission had a deadline that wouldn’t wait for their bodies to return to quiescence, and Blake was absolutely necessary to its success. As was Avon. Through a haze of suppressants, Blake had to rally the planet’s rebels and Avon had to wreck a complicated computer. Unfortunately the rebel group, per usual, included a lot of boisterous Alphas. They looked at Blake, on the cusp of a heat, like a god they wanted to follow and fuck and eat alive.

Avon had often been accused of bad-tempered snarling, but he’d growled like an animal at the Alpha leader who’d shaken Blake’s hand when they’d teleported down (almost grazing the live apocrine glands in Blake’s wrist). He’d nearly backhanded the other team’s technical expert for getting much too close to himself. This near his own rut, Avon  _especially_  didn’t want to be touched. Not by just anyone, anyway.

The probe slipped in his hands, twice. Avon had to step back, close his eyes and breathe so as not to destroy the machine he was trying to subtly sabotage in his rage. They were in a small building that had been a Federation command outpost before they’d taken it. Though they were working in the only room of the three with windows, Avon felt trapped and overheated, as if there were no ventilation at all.

“What do you need?” Blake asked, seemingly calm—though he must have been warring against an equivalent hormonal imbalance. As ever, Avon admired his self-command. But that war wasn’t entirely invisible. Blake’s face was glossy with perspiration. His pupils were dilated, and he smelled— _god_  it was strong. Rebels, running past outside, occasionally caught a trace and craned their heads in search of Blake. If he hadn’t been drowning in chemicals that made him parse this as a challenge and a threat, Avon would have found it comical. As it was, he batted off unproductive impulses to shoot people on their own side.

“Would space help?” Blake asked when Avon didn’t respond quickly enough. Blake nodded in response to the inarticulate confusion on Avon’s face. “All right. I’ll still be here, Avon—just in the next room.”

He extended his hand like he wanted to touch Avon’s sleeve to reassure him, but then thought the better of it, dropped his own arm and walked off. Worry and panic lanced through Avon as Blake put distance between them and left his line of sight, but he brutally quashed these. It was fine. _Blake_ was fine. Simply a room away. This was not rejection or abandonment. It was done pragmatically, even meant as a kindness.

And it _was_ working … to an extent. Avon exchanged Blake’s arousing, reassuring presence for a degree of mental clarity. With steadier hands, he forced himself to complete the task. He still had to concentrate, and it wasn’t his fastest work, but the thing was accomplished in the end.

Even as he finished, he heard a disquieting creak, which sounded loud to his on-alert Alpha senses. Specifically, it sounded … like the exterior door to the room Blake was in being eased open by someone who didn’t see fit to announce themselves.

Avon opened his mouth to call to Blake, but thought better of it. If it were a Federation straggler or the first advance of some rear-guard action, they might panic and fire on Blake immediately if they realised someone was onto them. Creeping as silently as he could, Avon moved towards the doorway, raising his own weapon.

Suddenly, he heard the sounds of a scuffle. Avon tossed caution aside and broke into a run. For a moment he didn’t understand—why would someone physically fight Blake rather than taking him out from a distance? But when Avon made it past the threshold and saw the glazed gleam in the uniformed Federation trooper’s eye and the sheen of sweat on his face, when he smelled the rank taint of the other man’s rut-high pheromones, no doubt brought down early, in a cascade, by the ripe scent of an unclaimed Omega in heat, Avon (with a roil of nausea and a spike of rage) found he could guess the trooper’s motive quite well after all.

Avon didn’t dare shoot. He couldn’t risk hitting Blake. But before he could reach the two of them and pull the trooper away, Blake had managed to fire into his assailant’s gut. The trooper lay groaning, and Avon, without considering his course of action, bent and viciously snapped the man’s neck to finish him off.

It felt  _so_  good. Soothing endorphins flooded Avon, even in the midst of the crisis. He had killed a threat to the pack’s safety, to  _Blake’s._  He had eliminated a competing claimant for Blake, and satisfaction swelled in him like rising music. This, of course, had been one of the major drawbacks of the ABO genetic model—a tendency towards dominance battles and aggression.

He glanced back at the door the trooper had closed behind him—wanting, no doubt, an uninterrupted debauch. The other man must have been too stupid with his incipient rut and the smell of an Omega’s heat to detect another Alpha in the next room. Or perhaps the man had simply been stupid to begin with—Avon thought it likely. He gave the neck he’d broken, still squeezed tight in his fingers, a last, satisfying shake, making absolutely certain the threat was eliminated. There now.

Avon raised his head and looked to Blake, who was breathing hard, pressed up against the wall. Blake looked to be struggling to control himself, to suppress disgust or fear. Disgust with or fear of him? No, Avon thought. Do Blake more credit than to suppose him squeamish about things that had to be done. At what had almost happened, then: that made more sense. Avon frowned, scenting something else on the air. Something souring Blake’s aroma, which ought to have been even richer and headier than usual. Adrenaline and fear were obviously present, polluting his heat pheromones, but it wasn’t just that. Avon could detect _corruption_. _Interference_.

“Did you finish wrecking the signal-house?” Blake snapped, his harsh tone an obvious attempt to mask how disturbed he was, to assert control. He swallowed. “Are we through here? We need to rendezvous with—”

“Did he touch you?” Avon asked as coolly as he could, standing and turning to look at Blake, clenching his hands. But even as he said it, he knew that the thing dead on the floor had greedily grabbed at Blake’s wrists or neck in their struggle. The other man touched Blake’s appocrine glands and had, without permission, against Blake’s will, mingled his scent with _Blake’s_. And Blake was trapped in tainted skin until he could over-ride the pheromones or wash them off, forced to smell threat and violation all around him.

Avon shut his eyes and tried to fasten down the futile fury battering against his own skin from the inside, tried to still the wrathful, sympathetic trembling of his own body. How _dare_ —but the trooper was dead. There was no claim to contest. He had protected Blake, or, perhaps more accurately, Blake had protected himself. Blake had rejected the interloper. The combined scent meant _nothing_.

Still, the foul smell of Blake’s heat-hormones commingled with the signature of some hostile stranger _writhed_ through Avon. Counterproductively, Avon found he was breathing hard, taking more of it in, when all he wanted was to stop his nose and mouth. He made the mistake of meeting Blake’s eyes, and he knew from the sympathy in Blake’s expression that he must have looked something like he felt.

“Avon,” Blake breathed, like he wanted at once to receive and give reassurance.

He held out a hand, and Avon stumbled towards him automatically. Without thought, Avon took the offered hand, and they were in that instant lost. At the first contact of their skin Avon slammed himself against Blake and shoved Blake back against the wall. He made a harsh, jerked-out sound and pressed Blake’s contaminated wrist to his cheek before sliding it down to his neck, rubbing it assiduously against his own scent gland there to clean it, to overpower the competing claimant’s brief, invasive touch with more decided exposure to his pheromones. Blake’s breath caught at the action, and Avon dipped towards him to kiss his parted mouth hard, bringing up his own wrists to smear them against Blake’s neck, making a satisfied noise when Blake held up his yet-unclaimed wrist to rub against one of Avon’s, knitting their fingers together, clutching tight.

Avon broke away from the kiss to drop his head into the crook of Blake’s neck, kissing and licking out the pure, clean smell of Blake’s heat-pheromones. He groaned at the way they went straight to his cock and dragged his free hand down Blake’s chest, unfastening Blake’s trousers and sliding his hand in. Navigating past Blake’s own stiff cock, he slipped deft fingers around, shoving them into Blake’s warm, dripping cunt. Two, then three—no need to go slowly, heat had left Blake aroused and so _ready_ for him, so ready to be claimed by his Alpha, who loved him, who’d worked on his behalf and waited and who wanted Blake to know that he was _safe_. But even the awful threat they’d vanquished was now forgotten, except as it spurred them on. He twisted his fingers hard in Blake, pressing his thumb down against Blake’s clit, and gasped when Blake dropped his head back against the wall, whimpering like he _loved_ it.

“That’s it,” Avon murmured, watching Blake’s face as he worked. “That’s right.”

Blake was going to come for him, on his fingers, and Avon _wanted_ it, as much as he wanted the fuck against the wall that would follow. The movement of his hand made Blake arch up towards Avon’s body when Avon pulled away, and grind eagerly against Avon’s fingers when Avon shoved back into him. Avon’s knuckles, his wrist and the back of his thumb brushed teasingly against Blake’s testes and uplifted, erect cock as he worked. That would have to wait its turn, but Avon would give it its due.

“No one’s going to touch you but me,” Avon soothed Blake, nuzzling at his neck. He smiled at how Blake bit his lip against noise and pleasure and tried not to thrash as Avon slowed his hand but made the rhythm deep and relentless. Uncompromising.

Rubbing Blake’s clit in clockwork circles, Avon felt the muscles and the bones underneath Blake’s welcoming, reactive flesh; felt how vital and alive Blake was. And all the while Blake got slicker for him, and his hormones ratcheted up their assault on Avon’s senses. Avon moaned low against Blake’s skin as a fresh wave of them crested over him.

“Avon,” Blake said, sounding lost, “God, _fuck_ , Avon, we—”

“Yes,” Avon said, agreeing rather than asking for clarification. It seemed to him Blake was saying everything important as it was. The way Blake rolled the word ‘fuck’ around in his mouth was one of the loveliest things Avon had ever heard.

“We can’t,” Blake said, bringing up a palm to feebly push at Avon’s shoulder. “Stop, we have to _stop_.”

Avon stilled his hand, more confused than anything, and blinked at Blake.

“It’s not safe here,” Blake explained. “I’m not—calling them to us, now that I smell of you, but we’re still not _safe_.”

With a wrench, Avon forced himself to think. He closed his eyes and gathered himself sufficiently that, while he had nothing like his usual degree of awareness, he could at least _follow_ what Blake was urgently trying to tell him. His arousal subsided to a bearable level as he focused.

They were somewhere hostile. They weren’t _home_. Someone had already attacked Blake—someone else might have the same idea. If he and Blake had sex now they would both have to let their guards down. Blake was right—they weren’t safe here for an hour, let alone for the duration of Blake’s heat and his own rut. And if they did anything as stupid as fuck now, then they would almost have to stay on this planet until both of them were through it. There was no guarantee that either of them would be cogent enough to call for teleport immediately after the first unknotting, or that Liberator would be able to remain on-station indefinitely. Avon wanted to claim Blake somewhere appropriate and secure—with friends to guard them (he was mazed enough that he was, on instinct, thinking of their associates as their pack). He didn’t want to finish this in this comfortless bunker, with a _cooling corpse_ on the ground. It would never do. Even if it had been less risky, Blake deserved _far_ better.

Avon blinked hard, shaking his head to clear it. “I—can’t stay here, and not—Blake, come back with me.” He curled the hand that wasn’t buried inside Blake, the hand that had been clutching Blake’s hand for a while, now, more firmly around its captive.

“I _can’t_ ,” Blake said, sounding pained. “I can’t I—I have to—” Blake struggled to articulate it, but Avon, despite the feeling of impatient denial rising in his breast, understood. They had come here to do—something, something Blake thought was important, and it wasn’t quite accomplished. “You have to go back up,” Blake agreed, or reiterated.

Avon hated it, but he knew he was useless to Blake at present. Leaving would mean abandoning Blake in an unsafe environment—but they had allies in abundance, and though he hated to admit it, Avon couldn’t trust himself to keep control, now that he’d _finally_ touched Blake. He knew that insisting Blake return with him would get him nowhere, if Blake had decided that carrying out this plan was in the interests of their long-term safety. And Blake usually had a point about that, besides.

“Can you manage – alone?” he asked, knowing that Blake was capable and careful, but detesting that he couldn’t stay and guard him, almost fearing the separation itself and selfishly resenting the delay. He ached for fulfillment, and even good reasons couldn’t answer the tension in his muscles or the throbbing of his cock.

“I'll be back in an hour, up on the ship,” Blake promised him.

“Just an hour?” Avon demanded, fear and resentment and longing causing him to give Blake’s cunt a final promise of a stroke.

“Not,” Blake gasped as he twitched with it, “a minute more.”

Reluctantly, Avon withdrew his hand and, holding Blake’s gaze, licked his fingers clean of the rich, pheromone-laden slickness. There were perhaps more conventional ways to make himself presentable, but none so neat or so pleasurable. Blake watched him do it with heavy-lidded eyes, which shuttered as he accepted Avon’s thorough parting kiss.

“An hour,” Avon said, consoling himself and reminding Blake of his promise. He raised his still Blake-scented wrist to his mouth and pressed the teleport button. “Cally—bring me up.”

When Avon materialized on the teleport pad, Cally raised an eyebrow at him.

“What are you smiling about?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” he said, practically waltzing off to his room.

His step felt light and buoyant, and he flopped back on his bed gracelessly, grinning up at the ceiling like an idiot. His rut was almost fully underway, and if all went well, in fifty-seven minutes, after a year and a half of _wanting_ so hard he’d thought at times that his ribs would crack for the pounding of his heart, he would have Blake. Blake! Avon allowed himself to preen a little with pride, even as he felt feverish with anticipation and lust. He wanted to touch himself to relieve his arousal, but he wouldn’t—that was Blake’s. _He_ was Blake’s, and Blake was his, and soon it would be so obvious no one would need to ask him for an explanation.

He knew he was quite, quite high, but he was rather enjoying it all—he even luxuriated in the keen shafts of frustrated need that left him gasping, mouth open. His body knew it had been pressed against its match and ripped away before it had found satisfaction, and it was demanding he go right back and finish what he’d started.

 _Soon_ , Avon promised himself, a wild flurry of ideas and needs chasing themselves through his mind. It was difficult to concentrate on any of them for long. He’d never had a rut so bad—so _good_ , he corrected himself. Some scrap of text—he couldn’t for the life of him remember its origin—twisted through him. Oh, I have bought the mansion of a love but not possessed it, and though I am sold, not yet enjoyed. He ached to possess what was his, and he was gagging to be enjoyed. Time could not pass swiftly enough, even as the wait was a romantic sort of torment, with its own sharp pleasures.

Avon needed to while away the time, and he wanted to make himself ready. The room was in good order––Blake would be comfortable here. But he ought to take a shower, after having run around down on the planet. He didn’t care that Blake wouldn’t have any time to do the same, but he wanted to show himself to his best advantage, even having been chosen. (And cold water wouldn’t come amiss, just now.)

As he washed, Avon’s mind cleared a very little—enough that he tensed with expectation, and moreover with worry for Blake. But that was hard to hold on to in the face of rut’s euphoria, and when he could practically still taste Blake if he licked his lips.

Three minutes early, Avon’s breathing faltered as he felt Blake come back onto the ship. Avon felt a surge of affection at Blake’s having kept to his time, and a rush of relief at his safe return.

In the clothes he’d put on distractedly after his shower (he hadn’t wanted to wait for Blake entirely unclothed, to look foolish rather than appealing when Blake came to him, and he hadn’t a flattering robe suited to the occasion), Avon sat down on his bed and waited for him. He frowned with confusion when Blake’s path turned away from Avon’s cabin, towards his own. Then he felt an instant’s screaming panic and denial as Blake’s scent vanished again.

It was only the local air filters. Avon made himself recall that fact––Blake wasn’t dead. It was _just the filters_. Blake turned them on every heat. But Avon was far gone, and he hadn’t been braced for it, and there was _no reason_ Blake should have done it now. No reason for Blake not to have come to him.

Perhaps something was wrong. Perhaps Blake had been injured, and was hiding it from his own intended mate, like a brave, selfless and selfish _idiot_. Normally Avon would have feared rejection, but it was literally unthinkable to him at present. The thing took on a murky shape in his mind, and he knew it only as some ill-defined horror (no less potent for the vagueness of its form). He stormed to Blake’s room, relieved to encounter no one in the corridor en route. He was in no frame of mind for conversation.

Even addled by a rut, Avon was clever and skilled. Blake’s automatic pheromone-responsive heat-period containment door locks presented Avon with little challenge. Breaking them was the work of a moment. Once in Blake’s cabin, Avon let the locks snap back into place behind him. He’d no objection to the extra layer of security—provided he was on the right side of the door.

The shower was going. Avon heard the smack of the water against Blake’s body, and the sound only spurred his lust. Powered by bewildered anger and thwarted desire, Avon swept into the bathroom. Blake blinked, evidently surprised to see him.

Looking at him, naked and gleaming under the spray, Avon’s irritation melted away somewhat. In a gentle enough voice, he managed to ask, “Blake, what’s wrong?”

Blake turned off the shower. He was clean, and––perfect.

“You look so _sad_ ,” Blake said as though the observation had slipped out of him, watching his intended with a responsively pained expression. “Avon, you—”

“Was that all you wanted?” Avon interrupted, tilting his head at the handle Blake had just turned. Perhaps Blake had indulged some trivial impulse to present himself well—a mirror of Avon’s own thoughts along those lines. “Or did you want to do it here?” Avon asked. That too made some sense—Blake’s room was more comfortably appointed than Avon’s, and it was drenched in Blake’s arousing, reassuring scent. Perhaps Blake had simply acted out of an Omega’s instinct to make a den for them. Either explanation was endearing, in its way.

Avon could hear that he sounded distressed, but it didn’t even occur to him to try and curb that.

“ _Why_ did you turn on the filters?” he asked. That, Avon didn’t have an endearing explanation for. At best it was habit. At worst _something was wrong_.

“Avon,” Blake said slowly, carefully—and as though both cost him. “Avon _listen_ to me. I know it’s hard to understand this right now, but you—” His nostrils flared, like he’d caught a hit of Avon’s rut pheromones, and he shut his eyes and slowly re-opened them. “You _don’t_...” Blake tried, but he trailed off. “God, I want you so _much_ ,” Blake almost whispered, taking a faltering step towards Avon, who in turn took a step back towards the bed. He held Blake’s gaze, half trying to pull Blake closer with a rudimentary sort of mesmerism.

“I’ve always loved that we're in sync,” Blake continued, taking another step as Avon took one himself. They crept closer to the bed, Avon kicking off his shoes and stripping off his shirt and they went. “I _love_ that your body knows it’s mine. I get wet for you, you taste it on the air and get hard for me.”

Blake was before him now, Avon having stopped and let Blake come to him. Avon shoved Blake down on the bed and followed, sliding off his loose trousers and pressing his hard cock, the knot already starting to swell, against Blake’s naked stomach. He dragged himself against Blake’s own bobbing cock enticingly.

“Yes I do,” Avon agreed. “There. There, feel what you do to me.”

In answer, Blake groaned and spread his legs immediately. The insides of his thighs visibly shone with more than residual water, and despite the shower, his scent was already potent again.

“And that’s for me, is it?” Avon asked, voice heavy with appreciation, laying a proprietary hand over Blake’s cunt. “You smell _perfect_ , but I only got a taste. It was hardly enough—not when I’m starving. Sit further up,” Avon half suggested, half demanded. Blake scrambled to accommodate him, knocking against something lying on the bed as he complied.

“What’s this?” Avon asked, frowning and picking it up. No, he recognized the design without being told after all. It was one of those medical aid phalluses, intended to help an Omega weather a heat alone. Had Blake got it out when he’d come into the room, again out of force of habit, before rushing into the shower (and cleaning Avon’s pheromones off him)? Or perhaps he’d taken it out before leaving on the mission, anticipating his return?

Blake frowned at the object, as if half remembering something—something that gave him pause. “I thought I’d _really_ have to rely on it this time. Why did I think that? There must have been a reason.” His brow furrowed. Doubt crept into his voice. “Avon—”

“But you don’t need it. Why should you? You have me,” Avon said as if this concluded the discussion, tossing the thing somewhere or other. “Now where was I?”

Avon slid down the bed and, gently lifting Blake’s cock and testes out of the way with his hand, buried his face enthusiastically in Blake’s cunt, feeling a decadent, overpowering pleasure at licking Blake’s heat pheromones direct from the source. Blake greedily fisted his hands in Avon’s hair, rubbing his wrists through it in the process and picking up Avon’s scent-claim once again. Blake made thick, urgent noises in his throat and shoved Avon’s head down mindlessly, needing more. Avon groaned and rubbed his cock against the duvet, loving the taste and Blake’s appreciation, the sheer indulgence of this.

Blake _was_ worked up. He came quickly and sweetly for Avon, with hitching breaths and needy, begging movements of his hips. _Weak_ for this, Avon noted with delight—as he’d remind Blake every time Blake said a word against his sharp tongue. Private ‘oh but you like it’ taunts could be carelessly exchanged between them, now that Blake was his to indulge and tease and offer unvarnished council, in a more official capacity than before.

“Ready?” Avon asked, excitement making him brisk and professional, when Blake’s breathing had slowed after orgasm and his grip in Avon’s hair had relaxed enough to allow Avon to sit up.

“ _Yes_. Fuck me,” Blake begged hoarsely, swallowing. His eyes were dark and wide, and he stared at Avon as if enraptured. “Knot me, Avon, I need you, Avon, _please_ , I—”

Avon kissed him fiercely, with a tongue that still tasted of Blake and lips that still shone with the effects of his previous activity. He kept Blake pinned there while he slid in, and forced Blake to swallow the strangled noise Avon made when he entered him. He caught and savored Blake’s sharp answering breath.

Blake tore his mouth away, and before Avon could think to wonder why, Blake bit him hard, pressing his teeth exactly into Avon’s conigium gland. Bit deep and true, with Blake’s characteristic utter determination. Latched his teeth in and sucked and pressed with all his might, taking Avon and offering himself decisively.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Avon whimpered, aware that it wasn’t the appropriate thing to say when the love of your life claimed you, but unable in the moment to come up with anything suitably poetic. He’d never felt more _wanted_. The bite ratcheted Avon’s lust to a degree almost past bearing. By the time Blake slid his teeth free, Avon felt the pulsing pound of his blood in the wound and his heart and his cock all as one great thread of absolute, insatiable need. He could glut himself on Blake for a year, for a lifetime, and not answer it.

“Come here,” Avon begged, even as he tugged Blake into position. “Come _here_ ,” he repeated, mindlessly insistent, even as Blake moved willingly at the touch of his hand.

With decision, almost with delicacy, Avon bent to kiss Blake’s neck. He sunk his teeth into the muscle, letting the action be a wordless vow that expressed everything about _his_ choice, _his_ absolute commitment. Blake clutched his hand in Avon’s hair as he did it, holding Avon against him, encouraging him with unsteady strokes of his fingers against Avon’s cheek, drawing his fingers down along the wound at Avon’s neck he’d just created (making Avon shudder with the commingled pain, pleasure and reminder).

Blake dropped his hand and Avon pulled back, and they met one another’s eyes. Avon smiled slowly, and Blake gave him a sly grin, and Avon thought with solemnity and one rational inch of his mind _‘I am, I suppose, married.’_ The rest of him slid into a chaos of joy and a desperate carnality.

“I’m going to _ruin_ you,” Avon promised incoherently, giving Blake’s thigh a firm, possessive squeeze. And he would: he’d have Blake so thoroughly the man could never be returned to the shop, as-new. Claimed and changed and his, forever.

Avon decorously slid his cock almost entirely out of Blake, and when he pushed back in, he did it so hard and fast as to cause Blake to make a startled sound. Avon gave everything in him to a pounding fuck. Blake interfered with the process by hauling Avon down and kissing him, and Avon returned these favors with needy fervor, for once not minding an interruption to his serious work.

What Blake said didn’t interfere with Avon’s efforts at all, and in fact rather facilitated them: Avon’s name, over and again, like it was a pleasure to say it. ‘Yes’ and ‘right’ and ‘ _harder_ ’ and ‘more’, demanding and pushy as ever. Avon didn’t mind: not when it was this. Not when it was something he longed to give Blake as it was, and only appreciated being asked for. Whimpered, confused ‘I _want_ ’s that Avon met without Blake’s having to articulate that he needed stroked off so he could concentrate on and bear to keep being fucked (and even as his cock jerked and subsided in Avon’s hand, Blake squirmed like he wanted Avon to keep fucking him forever). ‘That’s _so_ good, that’s _brilliant_ , _god_ Avon’—all satisfaction, an edge of breathless wonder. A deliriously happy, smug, ‘my _mate_ , my—’ which Avon couldn’t have stood not to kiss him for for the world.

Soon Blake was too far gone to offer such a counterpoint. His groans became one long moan, punctuated by rises in pitch when Avon slammed into him. Avon felt his knot fill, pressing against Blake, kissing the rim of his cunt with every thrust.

“Lie still,” he told a squirming Blake as he forced it in, making the both of them gasp. “There,” Avon breathed, “there, I—no, I don’t want to pull out again, here—” Avon once again subjected Blake’s clit to precisely the sort of abuse Blake liked, while rocking his knot against Blake’s prostate. When Blake came from one or both of these attentions, the contractions brought Avon off as well. He came clutching Blake’s arms with his nails, hissing and swearing and managing a choked, reverent “ _Blake”_ somewhere in there.

Avon practically collapsed on top of Blake in the afterglow, locked in him. He smiled privately to himself, closing his eyes and relishing the fecund scent of his conclusion mingling with Blake’s. They smelled like iron and salt and _life_.

“We _are_ compatible?” he asked Blake, feeling both that they must be and also a touch of anxiety on the point.

“Like a lock and a key,” Blake assured him, sounding drugged with contentment. “Balanced and elegant as an equation. We just _fit_. We always have.”

“Mm,” Avon answered, shifting, inundated with satisfaction.

Blake lifted a finger to trace the shape of Avon’s smile. “You like me full of you?”

“ _Well_ ,” Avon drawled, as though it wasn’t much to him, rather than everything.

“You’re so determined and stubborn, you could probably accomplish it the first time out,” Blake said, as if to himself. Avon knew just what Blake was referring to. If he hadn’t already come, Blake discussing being _bred_ by him would certainly have pushed Avon over the edge. Even now the allusion made Avon flush with sharp pleasure, and Blake’s confidence in his efforts made him ache to prove that Blake’s faith in him wasn’t misplaced. Blake continued, sounding, for all Avon had ever accused him of dreaming, actually _dreamy_ for the first time in all the while Avon had known him. “We could have more children than the Federation rules allow.”

Avon shivered, his eyes still closed. The Federation’s stringent breeding regulations, which ran right against Alpha and Omega instincts, were a source of poorly-concealed hatred of the administration in many Carrier breasts. The caps were enforced more for control than due to a scarcity of resources. That had been the official reason for initially introducing them, but now, with colonies established, it was errant nonsense. What Blake was suggesting was illicit, and _so_ satisfying.

They could _do it_ , too. Living outside the Federation as they did, there’d be no one to _stop_ them. There’d be no authorization wait periods, no qualifying citizenship points to scrounge for, no mandatory examinations and no forced-terminations, should a heat make them forgetful of the demands of the state. Even if they hadn’t alienated the administration, Avon knew that any children of theirs would probably be clever enough to attract unwanted attention—to be assigned, as he and Blake had been, where it suited the Federation. And there was always a chance of being seconded to the sort of project that one did not return from. The thought of giving over his child, _Blake’s_ , to _that_ was awful to him. But now, they could do as they liked. Why _not?_ They could have as many as three children, or even four. They were outlaws, after all.

And Avon could be as illicit and honest with his mate as Blake was being with him—especially at present, with his higher self-critical functions offline for a little while longer. He opened his eyes to look at Blake.

“I daydream about breeding you,” he confessed. “About getting you with my child. Every rut it—obsesses me. I indulge wildly impractical fantasies. I think about having you pregnant constantly, never letting you catch a break.”

Blake blinked at him, looking a little surprised. “ _You_ want that?”

Avon grinned slowly at him. “Mmhm.”

Something seemed to be ticking over in Blake’s mind. “But I‘ve mentioned children before, and you didn’t seem—If anything, you—Avon, you’ve _never_ talked about wanting this before.”

Avon laughed a little. “I was never your mate before, either.”

Blake was clearly starting to come down. He looked increasingly confused. Avon didn’t quite think to worry about it. They were safe. He was locked in his mate. The idea of something going wrong was, in his current state, unfathomable to him. He only properly understood what Blake’s confusion might portend when, the instant they decoupled and could separate, Blake snatched himself away in a violent motion.

Avon fought an inane urge to panic at how, by rolling away like that, Blake was spilling his seed (which everyone knew decreased the chances of conception). The world was cold and lonely outside Blake, the air frigid against his warm body, and Avon shivered with the sudden loss. He’d have demanded an explanation, but Blake was gulping air in harsh breaths, looking as panicked as Avon had ever seen him.

Avon tried to marshal his thoughts to full clarity (coherence was returning to him only sluggishly), but it was difficult when his rut-bolstered instincts short-circuited imperatives that weren’t ‘comfort your distressed mate’. It was hard even to fully feel rejection and panic through the thick chemical influence of the new bond, which suffused Avon with euphoria. He felt as though ‘Blake’s-mine-now’ were running through the back of his brain on an old-style processing ribbon.

Coming up behind Blake and curling his hands around Blake's shoulders tentatively, Avon dipped and breathed in the smell of his hair. True he had wanted, desperately, for Blake to choose to be with him while he was fully in his right mind, but given what had transpired and his own rut-addled state, Avon couldn’t quite appreciate the loss there. It had happened. They would have to deal with it. It had been and was now out of their hands. It had been an accident of sorts, if one Avon was by no means displeased by the results of. But surely the way they’d reacted to it had been meaningful? It had happened because they fit. Blake had _admitted_ that.

He tried to explain. “What’s done is done, Blake—it was no one’s fault; neither of us could have prevented it. And now I—” he swallowed, almost hesitant to claim the title, shy as a new-made groom (and really, he was one), “am your mate, Blake.”

Nothing could change or diminish that. Even saying it made Avon feel a burnished-copper sort of glow. “I’m your mate,” he repeated, quietly. With certainty. “I’ll provide for you. I’ll keep you safe, I’ll give you a new life. A better one than you’ve been dealt thus far.” He rubbed Blake’s shoulder comfortingly. “This was, perhaps, a long time in coming. Given how we were thrown together and how biologically well-matched you admit we are. I am actually—somewhat surprised it didn’t happen sooner.” There had been dozens of occasions on which some misjudged containment period or what have you might have caused them to act on their prodigious affinity.

Blake had, after all, been close enough to bite when he’d first told Avon that he intended to take them to Cygnus Alpha. His Omega hormones had swamped Avon, who had just emerged from the thick forest of the airborne suppressants they’d been forced to inhale on the _London_ , and was consequently feeling exceptionally succeptible. Even then, that early, Avon had already been smitten with Blake’s way of handling himself (and him) in a crisis. With Blake’s easy humor, and with the way Blake’s mind seemed to work automatically in concert with his own. Blake understood him readily, anticipated his reactions and in turn provided Avon with ideas he could pick up and use: it was as though they shared a dialect, or were engaged in playing a co-operative game (which made miscommunications between them all the more frustrating, all the bitterer). Avon was retrospectively a little surprised that when Blake had pressed his point, he’d kept silent and still and not leaned forward and answered the argument very differently.

“Nobody’s fault?” Blake hissed, tearing himself away from Avon’s attempt to console him. “It was _mine._ I _tricked_ you,” he nearly whispered, sounding disgusted with himself. “I’ve never been ashamed of what I am before today. I’m so sorry. Avon I’m _so_ sorry. I know you never wanted _any_ of this. But maybe—no, maybe we _can_ still fix this.”

Blake’s head rose a little, and Avon looked on in silent horror as grim activity infused his mate’s wretched posture. “Orac will know if it’s possible to break the bond,” Blake insisted, seeming half-distracted. “Perhaps we could use heavy suppressants. Or hormone replacement. Maybe it’s still early enough.”

 _Early enough?_ There was no such thing. In his panic Blake wasn’t thinking clearly, but he was speaking too quickly for Avon counter his argument, even if he’d had the wherewithal to do it.

“Then, if we find something that works, we could set you down on a safe planet,” Blake continued. “I could finish off the Star One attack without you. And then the Liberator could pick you up and set me down instead. Liberator would be yours. We _might_ be able to pull it off if we stop now, if we never see one another again—”

In a panic, Avon cut Blake off by shoving him back down on the bed and re-biting him. Distraught, he brought his free hand down again to Blake’s cunt. Contractions from coming once more would increase Blake’s chance of pregnancy. Blake wouldn’t risk his own life with a child inside him, wouldn’t leave Avon if they had that together, would love _it_ if not him, would value Avon if Avon made him feel good (what did it fucking _take?_ ), would remember whose he was and that Avon had rewritten his body, had inscribed his own name in each of Blake’s cells and accepted Blake’s in his in return, if Avon reminded him with his _teeth._ He pulled back after a moment, wild-eyed, and saw Blake breathing hard, setting his jaw and forcing his eyes open even as he shuddered in his mate’s hands. Relishing what Avon gave him and _still_ trying to reject the gift.

Avon was out of his mind with rut and biological terror. Perhaps Blake’s morals were so strong that he could ignore the screaming of his own instincts and suggest such a course of action, but Avon’s weren’t. Not right now, not on _this_. What Blake was suggesting could _kill_ Avon. Worse it would mean separation from and incredible risk to his mate, who would have no protector, in Avon’s absence: no one he could _absolutely_ rely on.

In his fear, Avon utilized a weapon he would never normally have employed. He tried using his Alpha command tone to soothe his mate.

“Shh,” he tried, throat working against the rusty register, the unaccustomed coaxing. “You’re just afraid. It’s new. But you must calm down. You won't leave me? No,” Avon reassured himself, working his hand in Blake as much to the same end as to please his mate, using his free hand to clutch Blake to him, “no, how can you? You're mine.”

To Avon’s surprise, Blake sat up and pushed Avon back, slipping free of his arms and his touch. Feeling helpless, he watched Blake struggle against the compulsion, shaking Avon’s command off. Blake was so strong. It was beautiful, even turned against him.

“This isn’t _you_ ,” Blake insisted after a moment in which he worked himself loose of the compulsion to be docile for his mate, sitting on the edge of the bed and setting his elbows on his knees, physically curling in on himself like a threatened pill bug. He sounded distraught. “I’m trying to help you. This isn’t what _you want_ , Avon, it would never have happened if not for my _idiot_ plan. It was an accident of circumstances and biology, and now we have to try and fix it before it’s too late.”

“Everything is an accident of circumstances and biology,” Avon snapped, pulling himself together and focusing, as Blake had pleaded with him to, to make his rebuttal. “We acknowledge the structures they generate as real enough, or even call them intrinsic because it is the best term for them. Every quality that makes us who we are or organizes the world is down to those two things. And unless you believe in fate, everything is an accident.”

Avon crossed his arms defensively over his chest, but ploughed on, desperation making him reckless and fearless, lending him eloquence. To lose this argument would be to lose his best chance of swaying Blake, and possibly even to effect a mad, total separation. He wished Blake would shake off his hunched, anguished posture, wished Blake would _look_ at him.

“When I met you, it was meeting a missing part of myself. If our initial compatibility is ‘just biology’, then _fine_. It is nevertheless some recognition of what we are to each other, which eclipses that. You talk to me about pheromones.” Avon snorted. “Well I wanted you when I thought you were an Alpha, for—” he swallowed, but forced himself to say it to Blake’s face—which had finally, with an indefinable expression, turned towards his. “For your loyalty. Your intelligence, your unyielding decency. How—different you were, from me. And how alike. _That_ is still true. I don't want children,” he sneered, “just mindlessly to breed with anything suitable, out of an animal instinct to procreate. I want _our_ children, _your_ children, Blake. And I'm quite pleased you have this,” he reached forward and stroked Blake’s cock, still smarting at having been pushed back and _needing_ to touch Blake again, a little soothed when Blake let him, turned towards him bodily, breaking that closed-down huddle, “because I like the idea of your being able to take _me._ I like the idea of being able to suck you off, and to touch you like this: of being able to please with my body like that.” Avon dropped his hand. “That is _not biology,_ Blake. Or if it is, it’s such a development on the theme that the essentials are no longer relevant. It is like saying poetry is atoms.”

“Avon,” Blake started, and Avon, who wanted to say his piece, cut him off abruptly, leaning back once more.

“I don’t need you to love me,” Avon said, glaring hard at him. “Just to accept that I love you. You can at least do that for me.”

Blake regarded him very steadily, and Avon swallowed, on the edge of wild abandon but nonetheless defiant.

“Speaking of first impressions,” Blake said gravely, but with his own particular light in his eyes, taking Avon’s hand as he had down on the planet, “when I thought _you_ were another Omega, I thought you and I might take care of one another. If you’d allow that. When I said you were a civilized man, I meant that you seemed to deserve better than this—oh, we all did, but I thought you, especially, merited something finer. The vanity of love, I suppose, to think the person you cherish more deserving of happiness than others—but there it is. You were clever and brave, of course, but you seemed, even in your defensiveness, so _hurt._ So hard done by. I wanted to give you things. I wanted to protect you. I found I even liked your sulking and your bad moods—and you know they were hardly thin on the ground.”

“You … are serious?” Avon said slowly, curling his fingers around Blake’s as though to anchor them there.

“Yes, I _have_ always liked your bad moods,” Blake said with a slight grin. “And, for what it’s worth, I have always loved you. Not, perhaps, from the _first_ day, but I—” Avon kissed him soundly, and more than once, so it stuck, forcing Blake to continue around these demonstrations. “I could have resisted anyone I didn't want. I _did_ , under interrogation. But I couldn't have resisted you for the world. And you love me, do you? Over and above the pheromones.”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, if you can possibly help it.”

“Charming,” Blake drawled cheerfully, as though the insult were a fact, pulling Avon on by the hand until Avon was essentially in his lap. “Especially given that I always thought I acted on you like a drug. That it was always your body that wanted mine, and never you that wanted me. And I wanted you to choose all this, to choose—me.” His voice had gone quieter, more serious.

“I have,” Avon said, understanding Blake’s impulse totally, slipping his hand from Blake’s to touch his face. “I have always chosen you.” He chose Blake daily: chose to stay and to act in Blake’s part, chose to value Blake’s qualities, chose life and death with him over any other course. “And you—?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Blake insisted, laughing a little. “I’m surprised you don’t know. I’m not very good at lying about that sort of thing. In fact my attempts at deception have been feeble at best. That game we picked up on Marin––I told you it only had a two-player option. I lied. It has three and four-player modes, with the extension. But I threw _that_ away fairly quickly, and I’ve always kept the game in here rather than the rec room,” Blake had the good grace to look a little chagrined there, and to shift his weight in a way that indicated some embarrassment, “so that you'd have to come and play it with _me_ , rather than finding another partner.”

Avon laughed, unable to help it, surprised and amused by the trivial stupidity he could apparently drive Blake to and rendered thoroughly happy by this proof of his unexpected power. Blake grinned like it was infectious, like he loved the rare spectacle of Avon’s delight. He let his hands slip down around Avon, fingers spanning his back. Avon obligingly leaned into his hold, draping his own arms around his mate’s shoulders with authority.

“I had no idea,” Avon said. “I’m afraid I’ve been avoiding your room because I'm afraid I'll give in to temptation when your back is turned and roll around in your sheets. Or humiliate myself by getting hard just standing somewhere you sleep and weather your heats.”

Blake raised an eyebrow at Avon, running a hand along the bed as if to say ‘what, these sheets?’ Avon shrugged, unembarrassed, his lip curling in a small smile. Avon’s very positive reaction to this initial disclosure seemed to provoke Blake to further confessions, perhaps in hopes of eliciting similar effects. Blake nodded at the medical aid Avon had carelessly thrown across the room. “I pretend that toy's you, during a heat. When I close my eyes and suck it off and only taste myself, I try and rationalize it. I let myself think it's what you smell like claimed, or that you've fucked me and you’re still wet with me as I suck you.” He restored the hand that had patted the sheets to Avon’s back, where he rubbed idle circles as he spoke.

During a heat cycle, thinking about sex was a sure-fire way to get distracted, to let what little control you had slip away. Especially if you were sitting with a partner in your lap. Sure enough, Blake’s eyes went glassy as he spoke, and he seemed to lose the thread of their argument. He continued, more interested now in articulating his fantasies to his mate than in whatever difference of opinion they’d been having. Avon had no objection to hearing them. In fact the resulting effect on his own gaze drew Blake on, acting both as encouragement and provocation.

“I think about tying you down during a heat,” Blake murmured, “so you strain against the bindings, and your hips buck and you go mad trying to take me, while I get heat-sick and desperately fuck myself on you. I wonder whether you’d hate it more than you’d love it. And I let myself think too far ahead—I think about you having me after getting me pregnant. I think about you taking me over a desk when all this is over and done with and I have some government position back on Earth, because you can smell my heat coming on better than I can, and you know why I'm agitated and cross before I do, and you want to take the edge off to make me fit to live with—I think about you using your command-voice to tell me to keep quiet, because I don't want our children to hear daddy screaming, now do I?”

Avon found it difficult to breathe, and mastered himself with effort.

“You’d be president,” he managed, correcting Blake’s assumption. “Otherwise …” He wanted the life Blake had described so much that even Blake giving it to him in this form was immensely affecting. _Let’s get started,_ he wanted to say. _Right now, this instant._

Blake seemed to pick up on that. The brightness in his eyes dimmed, and his mouth twisted into a sadder shape. “We can’t have children now,” he muttered. “I can't lose another family—you know what it did to me.”

Avon could imagine. Blake was so tied up with other people that when they’d lost Cally on a raid, though they’d only just taken her on-board, he’d been determined to charge back and rescue her. Blake thought himself responsible for everything and dreaded people close to him being taken from him. Omegas were particularly prone to pack feeling along those lines, and Blake more than most. Yes, Avon thought that Blake probably regretted his siblings and parents deeply, and felt the loss of them profoundly. He nuzzled Blake’s bitten neck in sympathy, and by way of silent reminder that, for what it was worth, Blake did have something in the way of family, now. A pack and a mate to lead it with.

Blake took Avon’s hand in his and shook his head. “We’d never be safe enough for that, no matter what we did. No matter where we went. We’d be like all those running scientists—Ensor and Docholli and the rest. Looking over our shoulders for decades. And sooner or later, they always find you. The only safety,” Blake’s voice hardened, “lies in _winning_.”

“I didn't want to admit it,” Avon said slowly. “There was a facile sort of comfort in letting you be my better half. In allowing you to voice all the unpleasant thoughts—Oh, I could trouble-shoot, but I let you be the one to propose the courses of action I didn’t want to think were necessary.” Avon grinned in self-mockery, then grew serious. “But you're right. We must win, and we cannot seriously consider having children until we do.”

However long that took, if they even both came out of it alive. They’d need to take something to retroactively prevent fertilization during this heat. The idea appalled Avon in a rut, driven as he was to breed his mate, but he fought down the nausea and pushed back the despair. It was necessary.

“We _will_ do it afterwards,” Blake said vehemently, lifting Avon’s hand to his mouth and kissing it, making it a promise. He breathed out slowly, and Avon knew Blake wasn’t doing this _to_ him, that he derived no pleasure from this denial, and that it was hard for him too. He knew it before Blake said, his voice sounding raw, “I want so much to do that for you. I want to give you a daughter with your eyes.”

“Don’t,” Avon said quickly, squeezing Blake’s hand tightly. “Don’t, love. I can’t bear it.”

“I sorry,” Blake said thickly. “And I’m sorry I _can’t_ —I so want you to have a home.”

“I do,” Avon said, meaning it, turning to look properly at Blake, to cup Blake’s cheek in his hand. “So long as you're alive. Wherever you are, I have one. Just _stay alive_.”

“I suppose I’ll try for both of us,” Blake said with a soft smile. “And for the future.”

Avon squeezed Blake’s new bite-mark in acceptance, and Blake shivered at Avon’s touch. “It’s coming on again.”

So it was. Avon could feel another epicycle, building between them. Another rush of warmth pulling at his limbs and pooling in his groin.

“Use your command voice again,” Blake said, and Avon raised an eyebrow.

“You can resist it,” Avon reminded him, wondering what Blake was after.

Blake shook his head. “If I really work for it, yes. But I don’t want to resist you. I want to feel you in my head and in my limbs. Right now, I want to do _exactly_ as you say. I want to give in to it. To give you everything I _can_ give you.”

Avon stifled a groan. _That_ was even better than the pull of the cycle, and between the two he was growing hard again. “You asked for it,” he said with relish, never slow to pick up and run with a good idea. He cleared his throat. “Turn over.”

Eagerly Blake did it, letting Avon’s voice press him flat on his stomach.

“Good,” Avon said, licking dry lips and stoking himself fully hard. “Now get yourself ready.” Blake complied wantonly, and Avon watched him finger himself open and play with his own trapped cock with rapt interest. “Oh that’s _very_ nice,” he assured his mate. “Go on, Blake. Spread yourself for me.”

Avon bit his lip as he pushed himself in, taking Blake’s shoulders in his hands to steady himself and digging his nails into Blake’s bite, hard enough to make Blake hiss.

“Tell he how it feels,” Avon insisted, and Blake did so until he could only make feeble, incoherent pleas. “Oh I will,” Avon promised in response to Blake’s begging to be knotted. “Tell me you love me,” Avon commanded, and Blake gasped it as Avon rammed the swelling knot in and out of him, doing so again and again until the knot locked. Avon came and Blake shook under him, meekly accepting it when Avon reached underneath him to take his neglected cock in hand, forcing him to come in Avon’s tight grip even as he clenched on the hard knot against his prostate.

Afterwards, Blake’s whole body seemed loose and heavy with satisfaction. Avon thought smugly that he’d done that—fucked his Omega until Blake dripped with his come, until his mate was tired and replete. He held Blake silently for the lock period, and then gently disengaged, slipping down to lay beside him until the next cycle took them.

Avon thought about their conversation before sex and ran his fingers across Blake’s back. “No,” he murmured in his normal voice, “tell me about her after all.” He found he did want to hear about the daughter Blake wanted to give him—the child with his eyes. Avon appreciated the thought, even if he’d seen himself in the mirror and didn’t think his eyes particularly remarkable for beauty—if Blake wanted to be fonder of his features than they deserved, Avon had no objection.

“I wouldn’t want to give her my sister’s name, or my mother's,” Blake said after a moment. “Nothing can bring them back or make having lost them any better. I wouldn’t want to imply that _that’s_ what she’s supposed to do and to be. No, I think she’d be called Mazarine. If you agreed, of course.”

“I was wondering whether I’d be consulted,” Avon said, trying to sound wry, although he felt anything but. Blake clearly understood this, because he gathered Avon into his arms, his voice rumbling through Avon’s chest as he continued.

“The historical chronicles from before the Last War suggest that after a vast conflict, a resistance fighter laid down arms and became his nation’s first socialist president. He had a child with his beloved mistress, a museum curator, and they named their daughter after the first library established in their country. That's it––everything the chronicles tell us. I don't know if they were good or bad people, by their lights or by ours. I don't know what Mazarine did, or even if she was happy. And no one knows anything about the library. But it's a beautiful word, and there seems to be a lot of hope bound up in it.”

“Mazarine,” Avon repeated, testing the syllables on his tongue and the heft of another of Blake’s dreams against his heart on the scale with which he weighed the world. Finding they balanced, as they so often seemed to do. “All right,” Avon said, choosing this too.

The dream of what they would do after the war was given a name, and became something as real and tangible as their mating bond. There was no further discussion of a separation.


End file.
